Approved by the Stockholm Visitors Board

Today I am lobster red, the usual result of taking me outdooors. Yesterday my sister and I arranged a belated birthday celebration for our mother and took her on a day trip to Drottningholm Palace. Of course we went by steam boat: S/S Drottningholm.



The much-praised Stockholm Archipelago is really the continuation of the islands, isles and islets in Lake Mälaren and I've always been very fond of travelling lakeside where the shores creep near the boat. It is also fascinating to know that what looks as dense pine forests in fact are just thin barriers in front of the most densely populated areas of Sweden. Shore protection laws are cool.

Denephew wasn't quite as appreciative of the beauty of water travel.



Soon however we arrived at Drottningholm and found ourselves a spot on a lawn where we picknicked. The sister had bought a Kubb set and soon we had a closely fought game going. Denephew insisted on being on my team, which much flattered me, and he didn't do at all badly, but eventually we (or at least I, he wouldn't hear of it) had to concede defeat.

Then Denephew and I went to explore the Labyrinths. I found to my surprise that the hedges all had little passages just the size for five-year-olds to run through and leave any adults behind. I don't know if they have been created on purpose by the gardeners or if millions of visiting children over the years have excavated them. I tried to explain the principle “If you get lost, stay where you are!” to Denephew, but it didn't stick as the imperative to joyously run as fast as his little legs would carry him overruled all concerns about ever getting home again. Fortunately his high-contrast clothes allowed me to glimpse him every now and then through the hedges and thus retrieve him. When I tired of the run-and-seek I scooped up the little lad and carried him back to his parents who by then had collected our belongings in preparation for a tour of the palace itself.

As has been noted by others, children strongly prefer ice cream to ancient art so while I was very fascinated by the huge battle paintings with careful legends, I did not get much of a chance to study them. I was very bemused by the room full of Klöcker Ehrenstrahl portraits of Charles XI's generals, all looking exactly the same, followed by the room full of von Kraft portraits of Charles XII's generals, all looking exactly the same. (Sorry, no photography allowed indoors.) I will have to return at some point to study all these closer.

Denephew then got his Nazi ice cream and we boarded the boat for the trip home. On the way, Denephew and his father played guessing games:
“What's round and brown, you roll it and you can fry it?”
“An egg!”
I think the boy should have gotten full points for that, one must be precise.

Veckans ord: urringning

På mitt nattygsbord har jag ett väckarur. Varje morgon väcker det mig med sin urringning.

Fire and ice

I am trying out Lejonet & Björnen's chilli-and-chocolate ice cream. Zounds! They are not kidding around with the chilli dose! It is an interesting combination, but on the whole I prefer my chocolate ice cream without hot spices.

Internationella igelkotten Ivar

There's a hedgehog that lives under the balcony outside the laundry room and yesterday evening I caught it on its way home from a walkie. It curled up so I wouldn't eat it and waited there until I had left.

Jag vill vara din Margareta

Vännen Martin R bidrar igen:

En del av nöjet med att lyssna på pop är att luska ut texternas dolda innebörder. Vi behöver bara titta snabbt på Beatles för att hitta exempel: “Please Please Me” tjatar om fellatio, “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” prisar LSD och “Sexy Sadie” klandrar Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.

Min fru påpekade nyligen att en av svenskarnas mest älskade dansbandslåtar är en oförblommerad skildring av transvestitism och homosexuell åtrå: Sten & Stanleys ”Margareta” från 1976, med text av J.E. Karlzon. Se bara: vartenda ord har en annan syftning än den man först tror.

Ingen vet det jag vet, en hemlighet.
Någon som jag tycker om har gjort mig het.
Kan inte hjälpa att jag känner det så här.

Åh, den blick som jag fick sa mig att,
Om jag vill kan jag få tusenfalt.
Och nu börjar jag förstå att jag är kär…

Jag vill vara din ska du veta,
Bara vara din Margareta
Står här vid din dörr, kär som aldrig förr,
men vågar inte ringa.

Pulsarna dom bränner så heta.
Känner du som jag, Margareta? [Jfr ”Jag, Claudius”]
Blickarna du gav, var dom till ett svar
eller ej?

Och jag går hem igen med min bukett [och handväska].
Det jag vill säga dig är inte lätt.
Kan inte hjälpa att jag känner det så här…

Ingen annan vet om min hemlighet mer än jag.

Queertolkningar av dansbandstexter är utan tvivel en litteraturanalytisk guldgruva.

Passing on

My setting up a home of my own unexpectedly brought me back in contact with my childhood best friend J, whom I hadn't seen in a long time. (There seems to be a strong instinct in single men to look after each other.)

J's father passed away some time ago, so he had inherited the family manor—big, decrepit and filled with the accretions of generations of packrats. As a child I had spent almost as much time there as in my own home.

With sorrow J had accepted he had to get rid of the house and its contents and now finally he had found buyers well-heeled enough to afford to (hopefully tastefully) renovate the building and the grounds (now just small strips around the building itself rather than the large and unkempt orchard my child-I used to run through to reach the house—the orchard in turn just a corner of the lands that the family had commanded in their heyday at the turn of the previous century).

This weekend was the last that J would have with the house and he invited me to share it with him. I biked over, pedalling on roads so familiar, yet in many places lined with houses that had been crammed in between the ones I remembered. The gravel path up to the house seemed not to have been filled in since I helped shovel gravel into the deepest potholes ages ago. Externally the manor looked just as I remembered it, the same horseshoe doorknocker on the door. I didn't need to use it, J had been expecting me and opened the door as soon as I had locked the bike. (It was imperative to lock the bike when I was 10 too, but I have to have a much sturdier lock these days.)

We went through the house room by room. There was enough of the original furniture still unremoved that it was easy to fill in the missing pieces—very little had been changed in the last 25 years. I peeked into the closet in J's old boys room and was immediately transported back to my tweens: the stacks of Svenska MAD, Märklin catalogues, audio cassettes, and Matchbox armoured cars were still there, overlaid with a slightly later sprinkling of 3.5" flopppies.

Stepping out of the serving passage I felt the smell of sun-warmed wood and remembered how we played ”Den försvunna diamanten” in summers so long ago.

In the end I had to leave, carrying some mementoes J kindly gave me, for a few hours having been back to other days; perhaps happier such.

Word of the Week: Christmas

Last week I lamented the very few words that could be created from the letters in “Funny Boy”. Well, some years ago I chanced upon a little booklet with fun games and puzzles for the tots to play so as to let their parents sleep in on Christmas Day. One of these was to make as many words as possible from the letters in “Christmas”. Of course I couldn't resist trying it and my goodness what fertile wordland that was:
a, aim, aims, air, airs, am, arm, arms, art, arts, as, ass, at, cam, cams, car, cars, cart, carts, cash, cast, casts, cat, cats, chair, chairs, char, charm, charms, chars, chart, charts, chasm, chasms, chat, chats, chit, chits, christ, cram, crams, crash, hair, hairs, ham, hams, harm, harms, hart, harts, hat, hats, him, his, hiss, hit, hits, I, is, it, mac, macs, mar, march, mars, marsh, mart, marts, mash, mass, mast, mat, match, math, maths, mats, mirth, miss, mist, mists, racist, racists, ram, rams, rash, rat, rats, rich, rim, rims, sari, saris, scam, scams, scar, scars, scat, scram, scrams, sham, shams, shat, shim, shims, shirt, shirts, shit, shits, sir, sirs, sit, sits, smart, smarts, smash, smirch, smith, smiths, stair, stairs, star, starch, stars, stash, stir, stirs, tar, tars, this, tic, tics, tram, trams, trash, trim, trims.
(And we can add some proper names: Amir, Chris, Christa, Cris, Irma, Ma, Mach, Marc, Mia, Rita, Sam, Tim.)

I think the next step would be to write a story about Christmas using all those words.

Why indeed?

For some reason the comp.text.tex news group gets regular attacks from people of precarious mental health who wish to tell the world of the secret monitors the lizard people have installed in their TV sets. Occasionally perverse curiosity makes me read a screed—it is painful in several senses so I gingerly let my eye skim over the sentences as if trying not to inhale the fumes. However, in a recent word salad, the following shone out:

why is their hair growing out of my ears?

It might be a simple typo, but taken with the rest of the rant it might just as well be intended as written. It does make you wonder, doesn't it?

Veckans ord: Funny Boy

I slutscenen i Funny Boy har publiken till The Funny Boy Show tävlat i att skicka in så många ord som möjligt användande bokstäverna i ”Funny Boy”. Martin Ljung, i fantastisk faster-förklädnad, har vunnit genom att dels ”låna” bokstäver, dels framställa ord som är helt okända för Svenska Akademin.
Nyfiken tänkte jag ta reda på vilka ord som egentligen går att få fram ur ”Funny Boy”. Besvärande få, visar det sig: bo, bon, by, byn, fy, nu, ny.
Nu är det ju förstås kanske inte så lätt att få till svenska ord ur två engelska, men det blir inte så rackarns många på engelska heller: bonny, boy, bun, bunny, buoy, buy, by, fob, fun, funny, no, nob, noun, nub, nun, on, yo, yob, yon, you.
En klart knepig tävling. Nån av läsarna som kan komplettera med fler ord?

Get snipped

Even Dagens Nyheter has realised that the developed (i e resource-consuming) countries are where population limitation is most important to enforce. Thomas Anderberg has written an article.

I was there

Why was I there?

The intrusion into my privacy, which privacy is dear to me, is one thing, though I suspect that I personally for the most part am insignificant, blond and paleskinned enough not to arouse the curiosity of data analysts, but at some point it is even more important to me that the proposed communications interception law is yet another step in a culture of fear. One can make—and certainly they are made—elaborate conspiracy theories about how this fear is nourished by shady characters in order to further their nefarious goals, but I do not think such conspiracies are necessary, Hanlon's razor applies here as elsewhere. Peter Englund has written about the internal logics of the situation, where the ability and possibility to eavesdrop on all communication necessitates that one does so. The reasons for this can then be made up afterwards. The reason currently in fashion is terrorism. In the previous century it would have been Bolshevism.

Lately I have been reading up on the origins of the Western European dictatorships of the 20th Century. It has struck me how the threat of Communism was used to get the influential people: the industrial magnates, the clergy, the army, to go along with the numerically very small movements of Phalangism, Fascism, Nazism, … One could perhaps argue that this external anti-Communism even abetted the totalitarian dictatorship of the Soviet Union by justifying the oppression as defence against infiltration by external enemies—but yet again, by the logic of the situation, an enemy would have been found if none had naturally presented itself. And thus these attempts to stem the awful plans of the enemy have caused the violent (or indirect) deaths of tens of millions of people throughout the 20th Century. The fending off of fear seems to be worse than the actual object of fear.

This is already happening again—or perhaps still, but now with a different label for the phenomenon to be feared. Certainly international terrorism has not yet managed to kill as many as the at least hundred thousand that are now dead in the War on Terror, and almost the same number of people have been imprisoned without trial, in many cases subject to torture even according to the rather lax standards of the US President.

This is why I oppose the eavesdropping law, as I see it as yet another attempt to play on fear, in such a way that the costs in all likelihood will greatly exceed the costs of any attack that may be perpetrated.

And finally, the law does of course nothing in the way of actually protecting Sweden against electronic threats. Should we be subject to a concerted cyber-attack, such as the one recently waged against Estonia, we will be caught with our trousers at just as inconvenient a height as before the enactment of the disputed law. So just whose security are we concerned with?

(Apparently I am very angry—my readability index is lower than ever.)

Veckans ord: Starköl

Båtars undersidor är uppenbart viktiga för deras fart, men man ser dem sällan eftersom de ju ligger under vatten. Som tur är står segelbåtar minst halva året på en trailer uppe på land, så därför kan vi studera denna fina bild av en Starköl:

More growing-up

So, the Only-begotten and Infinitely-beloved Daughter graduated from 9th grade. As a first step all 9th-graders in the school and their teachers had a dinner and a ball earlier this week. Parents were requested to help as bouncers and of course I responded, as always when Duty calls.

But, as I was leaving the office, the phone rang and I got stuck for an hour, helping a computer illiterate (but at least properly contrite) user somewhere several time zones away troubleshoot an installation of the company's software. So, as I arrived at the site, the dance had already begun. First, though, I had to make my way through the Breathalyzer-equipped squad of parents at the door. I was recognised and let into the building.

In the temporary headquarters I was given the plans for the evening and then I went out to reconnaitre the site. I noted with some consternation that the songs the DJ was playing were much the same as were popular when I was their age. A mother confirmed that there is an 80s revival underway—her son had expressed surprise that she was so into modern music that she knew the words to his favourite songs…

All the boys were very conservatively dressed in suits and ties (except for the one rebellious one dressed like Alexander De Large). The girls wore equally conservative dresses, but had by then given up on their high-heeled shoes and almost to a woman moved around barefoot.
The Daughter, dressed in a charming self-made combination of black tulle and latex, and her posse graciously came to greet me but then flitted away for other entertainment and I went on perimeter patrol. All was well and the returning long-distance reconnaisance platoon had nothing to report.

Groups of party-goers were starting to leave around 22:00, some in taxis, but at least one group of girls in brightly-coloured dresses, their shoes in their hands, sat at the tram stop like a lineup of exotic birds.

Eventually the Daughter and her friends also left for homes or other more interesting places. I stayed on a while longer, but as the number of parents soon outnumbered the dwindling number of still-dancing children, I was eventually dismissed.

And today was the graduation ceremony proper.

It started with the school choir leading the assembly in ”Den blomstertid nu kommer ”, which surely must be blasphemy, obviously it should be sung last.

Prizes were handed out.

As deservedly as could be wished for the Daughter received the prize for best results in Swedish and I whooped loudly from my balcony perch. The headmistress fumbled a bit with the words and awarded prizes for “fine results in spite of their hard work” to a couple of pupils. There was much rejoicing among the comrades of those who received prizes.

The choir came on stage again and a girl sung “Fields of Gold”, rather choked with emotion, and several girls, both in the audience and the choir itself, made weird flapping motions with their hands that I eventually deduced were attempts to dry their eyes without mussing up their makeup. I at my first row seating just had to lean forward and no-one could see the state of my eyes.

More songs, but eventually the classes withdrew to their home rooms for the handing out of grades (the Daughter points out she got even better grades than her brother, I am insanely proud), saying of goodbyes etc. The farewells grew increasingly protracted and eventually the Daughter sent the family off while she remained with her friends for yet a while.

Jag har en stol som tillhört Brigitte Bardot

Den gode Martin R levererar följande historia:

En god vän till min far berättade en historia om sin nu tonåriga dotter och vådan av att lära sig fel från början.

Tidigt, redan när flickan var knappt två år, hade hon lärt sig hela alfabetet med hjälp av ett bokstavspussel. Några år senare visade det sig dock vara ovanligt svårt för henne att forma ord av bokstäverna hon kunnat så länge. Hur hon än försökte kunde hon inte begripa hur man läste.

Skälet var namnen på bokstäverna som pusslet hade lärt henne. Detta stod klart för mor & far en dag när dottern påpekade att de hade stavat fel på en pojkes namn.

”Nej nej, Ville stavar med väderkvarn, inte med toalettdörr!”

Publicly-funded art

I'm not too sure about Get Out Clause's claim that they couldn't afford a video crew for this video—for the quality presented they could easily have used a cheap video camera operated by one of their mates—but the social commentary in performing in front of surveillance cameras and then asking for the footage under the Data Protection Act is absolutely brill.



H/t Ars Geek.

I foresee ergonomics issues

My first idea when I got the opportunity to work with the VPL DataGlove was to create a virtual keyboard. My plan was that it should be able to edit all aspects of the keyboard layout—the precise keys, where they were located in space and to have nifty functions to edit the layout so that one didn't necessarily have to lay out each key individually. To my disappointment the position sensors on the glove had neither the resolution nor speed necessary for typing, nor did the software handle collision detection well for so many objects, so when I realised that even a numerical keypad would require keys several centimetres across that could be pressed only once every few seconds or so, I gave up the idea.

Now I'm sorely tempted by the Virtual Laser Keyboard. Just the thing—a perfectly “soft” keyboard with optical tracking and wireless connection to your computer/PDA/mobile phone. Unfortunately the specs only say state that it has a QWERTY layout, so the risk is that the keyboard layout is locked in ROM, rather than being configurable, which would be a pity.

Then of course, there is the issue of typing on an unyielding surface, which brings down speed and accuracy, but I still could imagine trying it out.

Veckans ord: skinklåda

Jag har ibland funderat på att skaffa mig en ödla som husdjur, som t ex en blåtungad skink. Något överraskande visar det sig att man kan skicka dem som paket via budfirmor. Att göra en skinklåda för transport är inte så svårt: En stadig kartong med gott om stötdämpande material, kylklampar eller värmepåsar beroende på förväntad temperatur under transporten och själva skinken i en kraftig tygpåse. Fast jag är lite mjäkig, så jag tror jag skulle föredra en lite mindre klaustrofobisk transport från en djuraffär i närheten i stället.

The Order of Events

Once when I was talking with my mother the subject of “Where were you when you heard that Kennedy had been killed?” came up.
“Oh, I remember it so well, we were at Grandma's with you and your brother when they said it on the wireless.”
[headexplode] “What!? I wasn't even born when Kennedy was killed!”
[confused] “Sure you were.”
“John F Kennedy was killed in 1963!”
“John? I'm talking about Robert.”

Lesson: precision.

Civilization spreading

Even Turkey has started to accept the concept of clean air, by forbidding smoking in enclosed public spaces. Now, if they'd manage to rein in their military too, they could well join the EU as far as I'm concerned.

Ticking along

Veckans ord: oread

Somliga nymfer är rena slamporna, men en oread är minsann inte billig.

Secular trends

At my god-mother's funeral, there were some two hundred neighbours, relatives, and friends present. I noticed that I, my cousins, second cousins, etc, were, almost all of us, a head taller than our parents' generation, born in the war years with scarcity of food and everything else.

The Only-begotten Son passed me in length quite a while ago and I now have to reach up to tousle his hair.

But when he got on the stage today to receive his graduation prize he was the shortest of the young men up there. Where will this end?



No… Try as I might, I just can't manage to coolly drop that in passing…
MY SON GRADUATED FROM HIGH SCHOOL AT THE TOP OF HIS CLASS TODAY AND I'M PROUD TO THE POINT OF BURSTING!

Used up

John Feeney has an article in the Guardian arguing that it is not sufficient to cut down on our resource consumption per capita, but that the total human population has to be brought down for us to survive as a species. Or, in other words, the population will be brought down, but we have to decide whether to do it by starvation or contraception.
Worryingly enough the majority of comments seem to just deny the stated facts without reasoning or arguments, just screaming "NO!" like so many Star Wars characters.

Betrayed trust

Clothes and computers I believe in thoroughly using up. While my grandmother and oldest aunt were still alive, worn-out clothes would be recycled into rag-rugs, but these days I have to dump my Swiss cheese underwear in the trash—one only needs so many polishing cloths. Computers with crashed hard disks, burned-out screens and blind mice I have dutifully taken to the recycling centre under the assumption that they will be properly dealt with, metals separated from plastics and as much as possible turned into new electronics.

This is apparently not necessarily the case. Millions of tonnes of worn-out computers end up in the third world, compounding their environmental problems. This video from Consumers International briefly introduces the problem and the few seconds around 1:52 told me that this is my responsibility as well.



For some bizarre reason it is the Traffic office that handles recycling issues in Stockholm. I have written to them and asked how to make sure that my broken electronics don't become (more of) a health issue for Africans.

Towel Day

I fixed the frayed border on my big beach towel this morning.

An outing

The gang were going down to the Air Force Museum in Linköping and I brought along the Nephew, so as to properly indoctrinate him. Well, clearly the Lego pit was much more interesting than old aircraft, but climbing in and out and in and out and in and out of the old Draken cockpit was fun too.

The rest of us were treated to a very detailed description of how to actually fly a mission in the Draken by a museum guard who turned out to be a former control and elint officer. In response to a tricky question he said: “I'll hand that over to a weapons technician.” and turned to another museum employee hovering nearby who then went into a deeper explanation of the properties of first-generation Sidewinder missiles. Museums seldom keep with knowledgeable staff, but this seems to be the rule at the Air Force Museum. Kudos!

The museum shop is also to be commended in that they are not afraid of procuring rare model kits in order to be able to have as many Swedish Air Force Aircraft as possible available for purchase.

(However, I was a bit annoyed that in spite of promises, the museum had not updated the sign that claimed the 57 mm cannon on the SAAB T-18B was the largest-calibre gun ever carried on an aircraft. In Sweden, to be sure, but not in the world, where at the time several 75 mm monsters were lugged around and in later days even 105 mm howitzers have been used onboard aircraft.)

Veckans ord: genrepar

Hjälten och hans sidekick, ett klassiskt genrepar.

Double feature

The Vasa museum and the Maritime museum had joint inaugurations of model exhibitions today:
The 1:10 Vasa model placed next to the original has gotten all its sculptures painted according to what has been found about the original colouring. It is quite surprising to see the ship that traditionally has been rendered in blue and gold as in fact having had a red background with sculptures coloured like candy with illegal additives.



At the Maritime museum Göran Forss's 1:50 model of the destroyer Halland has finally been finished after almost 40 years in making. Listening to people talking, I gathered a sizable part of the audience had done their military service on board at some time or other and were very pleased to see the detailed model.

Counting my blessings

The setting sun is shining in through the French windows of my sitting room, the pair of tits that live in the crack in the wall by the window take breaks on the railing outside it, beaks full of…whatever, before they squeeze themselves through the crack. My dinner noodles were particularly tasty (mental note: stick to that brand) and I'm feeling quite pleased with life.

I got a glowing performance review at work (Improvement goal: to always remember to say “Best regards” in email to customers), successfully chased up a persistent bug and when I got home I found present packets in the mail from friends: exotic teas and Clas Svahn's brand new book Stora boken om naturfenomen featuring photography by me (and some hundreds of other people :-). And the latest Scientific American.

Every now and then, life is good.

Shameless speculation

There's a new “lifestyle” magazine out. It's about travel to faraway countries, expensive cars, fancy clothes and whatever other luxury items you can imagine (or not). But, since they tack on the wordlet eco every few sentences it means they are “environmentally conscious without boring pointers”. I think I should bring my own boring pointer and give the editor a good hiding! How can encouraging luxury consumption ever be environmentally responsible!? But of course, it's all about appealing to a customer base that feels vaguely uneasy about this climate thing and thinks they should probably do something, as long as it does not mean sacrificing anything.

I'm not faultless, but at least I feel guilty about it…

With this in our past, where is our future?

The Only-Begotten Daughter's theatre class gave a play again: Animal Farm.
They might have benefitted from a few more rehearsals, but overall they acquitted themselves well, with sterling performances by “Boxer” and “Benjamin”.
Watching the animals starve and rebuild their windmill again and again I wondered what lies ahead for these bright kids, if they can look forward to a reasonably privileged life or if they will have to struggle for their lives through upheaval and famine—certainly even Sweden was a much harsher place to live just a hundred years ago. Hasse Alfredsson has expressed it so much better than I.

This is what flying was meant to be like!

“Fusion Man” Yves Rossy straps on his jetpowered wings, steps out of an aircraft and flies off.

A very good video is made available by The Guardian.

I want this so bad!

Veckans ord: orkidé

Jag har känt mig lite trött och orkeslös. Det beror säkert på att jag motionerar för lite. Jag ska ta fram cykeln ur källaren och trampa runt, det verkar som en utmärkt orkidé.

Quarneval

I proclaim today to be the first day of summer: almost 300 K, few scattered cumulus clouds and Quarneval! As usual I sat on the wall outside Stockholm City Library and dangled my feet above Sveavägen. There will be better quality images on the Quarneval website, but here are some of my own snaps:

The Quarneval princess, with bodyguards.

The Pipes and Drums of the First Royal Engineers.

Not quite as disciplined: Osquar Mutter.

From the School of Computer Science and Engineering: Mother Fokker with Baby Fokker. (Uncle Fokker is tailing behind, out of view.) Note the guy carrying the tailplane that apparently fell off at an early stage.

Sushi con Quarne with Japanese whale hunters.

Love Hero.

Gislaved Drum & Drill Corps. A quite unique sound with lots of cow bell.

Sometimes you just have to split up.

Last in the parade as always: Mosquito, followed by dancing, swaying, walking Stockholmers.

A most unusual perspective: walking in the middle of Sveavägen. It's really very beautiful this way.

Veckans ord: markanden

Blott de tama fåglarna har en längtan, de vilda flyger.

Och på backen sitter markanden och styr.

Go shop!

This afternoon I was invited to a sneak preview of the new Fair Trade Shop on Tegnérgatan 8 that will open on Saturday. Now, those of you who are familiar with this part of town will recognise this as the house of the Mission Covenant Church of Sweden and indeed the shop turns out to share premises with Gummessons bookstore and all of the staff seemed to have ties to the church. To my disbelief(!) there was even a speech made by a mission pastor who then prayed over us and surprisingly many in the audience bowed their heads. I didn't quite expect such things to happen in Sweden, but then again, I live a sheltered life.

Still, the shop has nice stuff, in particular Fair Trade clothes, which have been difficult to get hold of in Stockholm, so I'll just sigh deeply and shop there anyway.

Tea, toast, and typesetting

A quiet evening at home.

Squarely in the uncanny zone

While a technological masterpiece, I find the Boston Dynamics Big Dog rather creepy.



It seems the developers Pantless Knights also have noted the weird feeling the opposing legs give and made an alternate version of the video.

Planing out

Veckans ord: farhinder

Gatukontoret lägger gupp i vägen. Cyklar man för fort över dem kan man råka mosa kronjuvelerna, då har guppen blivit farhinder.

Better than Ubuntu cola

I'm really more of a Lisp hacker than Linux user anyway.

Maligned mathematics

Statistics is for me the archetype of science, to work with incomplete data and decide what conclusions we are justified to draw from them. Doing statistics properly is non-trivial, requiring both knowledge and skill, but misused statistics are all too common. Accordingly many tend to treat statistics as if they were just an issue of making up arguments for pre-determined conclusions.

Red Top once quipped:

Statistics is the science that says that if a person has one foot in the freezer and the other on a hob, he will on average be fairly comfortable.

Now this is an example of misusing statistics. Consider: If the example refers to temperature, a freezer would have a temperature of approx 250 K, a hob plate up to approx 600 K. Averaging the two temperatures would give 425 K, tissue-damagingly hot, so the conclusion is false.
(We do not know the heat content of the freezer and hob, respectively, but we can assume that if they are plugged in, the heat-conduction of the feet can be ignored.)

So, is the example to be taken as averaging “too cold” and “too hot”? Since these are (fuzzy) categories, they can't be averaged, so the conclusion is meaningless.

More meaningful for our wide-legged test person would perhaps be measurements of comfort level. The validity and repeatability of these measures can be questioned, but in principle we can get numeric values to work with, so-and-so much for one foot and such-and-such for the other. However, as both are on the “discomfort” side of the scale (per the problem statement), thus averaging out to discomfort, the conclusion is false again.

Remember kids: Always do your stats carefully and do not assume that you can use tests for normal distributed data on any data.

Veckans ord: fisklåda

Jag har en massa födoämnesallergier—äter jag fisklåda så får jag det.

Getting high on the West Coast

Late in the evening this past Monday I arrived in Gothenburg, just as jubilant and not-so-jubilant fans were moving towards the station from Ullevi football stadium. AIK had lost. Darn! I also saw the tram I should have been on pull away from the tram stop, fifteen minutes to the next. I spent those studying a, presumably, inebriated harmonica player courting a girl, who took this in good humour. I also found that Gothenburg too has introduced SMS tickets for public transport. Very convenient. I will have to run a test soon and see if I can get through a month without any cash at all. The tram trundled noisily through the slightly chilly night city and we soon ended up at my target traffic nexus. Hotel Gothia Towers was not difficult to locate, the twin towers rising high above me. Check-in was smooth in spite of a new and inventive misspelling of my name and soon I found myself on the 19th floor, looking out over famous Gothenburg landmarks. After having admired the skyline for a while I went to sleep.

Breakfast was served in a restaurant with a little bit too much of canteen feeling for my tastes, but nothing wrong with the buffet. Sponge cake for breakfast, yum! Then I set off for the conference I had been invited to. It turned out to be be very well-organised with lots of demos, presentations in parallel sessions and I chatted with people I hadn't seen for too long. I realised I have missed going to scientific conferences. I enjoyed myself greatly.

The social event in the evening took place at Peacock Dinner Club. I walked there with some colleagues and reflected that Stockholm is much more cramped than Gothenburg where the avenues are wide and bordered by wide pavements with proper bicycle paths and often even little lawns in front of the houses. It makes for a very pedestrian-friendly city. The dinner club turned out to be a very classy joint—when I asked for guanabana juice the bartender didn't bat an eye, just reached out for a bottle and poured me a glass, just like that. They didn't have banana juice, but they offered lychee instead, which was OK by me. However, I couldn't stay too long, as I had a presentation to prepare, so eventually I went back to my room and worked till late with the view to inspire me.

My presentation went over quite well, with a Q&A session lasting almost half an hour. Some of the questions I thought were rather tenuously connected to what I had spoken about, but that just let me take a “wider perspective” in my response, i e blab on. During the coffee break, a man came up and asked: “So what was your presentation about? This technical English is really hard to follow.” Ungh! I squirmed inwards but politely gave a condensed version in Swedish. For a moment I was confused by the statement that technical English was difficult to follow—I can make do in several languages as long as the discourse is constrained to technical matters, but then I realised that that is true as long as you remain within a familiar area of technology, where the terminology is shared and known. Nevertheless, I was still a bit disappointed that I hadn't managed to get my point across, I certainly don't consciously attempt to be abstruse and I'm always upset when I've failed to explain the work which is so dear to me.

In the afternoon I decided to skip the last workshop session and instead went walking in springy Gothenburg—the sun was shining, the Emilias were pretty, and the pollen count was high. My eyes and nose ran like fountains and I sought shelter in the railway station.

On the train back I found I had no WLAN in my car. The conductor did not quite understand what the problem was, but was eager to help and let me change seat to another car where I soon was connected again. It has happened to me before that car 6 (the end car) has bad (non-existent) WLAN coverage, maybe I should take that up with the SJ network people.

Instant psychedelia

Among the OS X widgets is a language translator from Systran. The quality of translation varies quite a bit among the available languages and for some reason Italian seems to have a subpar translation engine. To amuse myself I fed in the lyrics for Irene Grandi's Bruci la città and translated into English. The result was not quite “A whiter shade of pale”, but still fairly surrealistic. Note also the out-and-out bug that occasionally inserts full stops between words:

Caterpillars the city
and landslides the skyscraper
you alone remain
knot on my bed.

Caterpillars the city
or lives in the terror
nel.giro.di two hours
vanishes all how much
svanica all the rest.

And all those boys as you
they do not have nothing as you
I cannot that to admire
I cannot not scream
that I tighten to you on my heart
for protegerti from the evil
that I would want to be able to rock
your pain your pain.

It dies more under a tram
or less all the world explodes
stars explodes all this.
It dies what
it is other from we
at least two for little
at least for error.

And all those boys
as you they do not have nothing
as you I would want
give to make to me
to perhaps be better
make shield you
with my heart from catastrophes and fears
I do not have
nothing to make
this I am
what I know to make
I cannot that to adore
I cannot that to leccare
this your deep love
this your deep one
I cannot that to adore
this your deep one.

Falling asleep

Earlier this week as I went to bed, it broke beneath me. In the morning I examined the bed a bit closer and was surprised at the common-sense-defying design. The mattress, a Sultan Sturefors has a series of boards underneath, supporting the springs. These boards are simply attached with two large staples at each end. The staples have nothing in the way of barbs, grooves, or anything, they are just smooth strips of metal, parallel with the forces when someone lies in the bed. Clearly it is just a question of time before they work themselves out of the wood, and the time was now.

I requisitioned transport and brought the mattress back to IKEA, where a person in the complaints department stared at it incredulously and really didn't seem to take to heart my proposition that this was an accident just waiting to happen. There was however no question that I wouldn't get credited the price, so I went back in to retrieve instead a Sultan Storfors, which has a more sensible construction with the boards resting on a frame and thus unlikely to just drop out the bottom.

I will now proceed to test the new mattress.

Veckans ord: tentakel

Tentavakterna på KTH tenderade att vara pensionärer som, med få undantag, övervakade salarna med örnblick. Men även om de för ett ögonblick hade tittat bort så inte hade man haft tid med nåt tentakel med Osqulda där man skrev med svetten lackande.

Veckans ord: slumpartikel

När jag bodde i USA en period reflekterade jag över att amerikanska hus syntes finnas i två varianter: sprillans nybyggda och väldigt nedgångna. Min hypotes är att berggrunden där strålar ut slumpartiklar som nöter ned husen.

Shake the box, rattle and roll

We laughed a bit when the favourite hobby store got model kits of pop bands and instruments, but appparently they're more clever than you'd expect:


H/t Sten Sundelin.

Veckans ord: obligatorisk

Ett obligato är ett avsnitt i ett musikstycke som kompositören markerat inte får utelämnas vid omarrangemang eller improvisationer. Man misstänker att ju högre kompositörens tankar om sin egen förträfflighet, desto större obligatorisk.

Communicado again

It seems I can send and receive email again, touch wood, inshallah and all that. I've felt like Joe Bonham the last few days.

A bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes

Yesterday morning I found my email didn't work. I wasn't terribly surprised, it was fairly obvious that Comhem had screwed up the transfers of accounts due to my recent move, and I even had a fairly good guess about what the precise problem was.

So I call customer support. “Right now many are calling us, call back later.” Lather, rinse, repeat.

Eventually I get “You are placed in queue. You are now … number 43. For speeding up processing, please enter your customer number and press #.” I enter my customer number and press #. Then I fiddle with stuff for fifteen minutes while the queue is processed.

Finally a human voice responds. I explain my problem and what I want done about it. “Uhm, err, OK. What's your customer number?” The one I just entered for you, so processing could be speeded up by you not having to ask for it? I give my customer number. Possibly I do this through gritted teeth, because I have to repeat it a couple of times before it gets across properly.

Of course the person I speak to is unable to solve my problem but has to escalate it to someone who actually knows how to operate a computer, but they'll call back! “Do you have a number we can reach you at?” Yes, and it's in my customer records that would be in front of you if you hadn't been abandoned by your management and forced to use quill and papyrus as working tools. I give my number, with the mandatory repetitions.

Of course I do not receive a tracking number for my case, so now when I still have not been called back and still don't have working email, I'll have to explain it all from the beginning for the next customer support droid who will have no idea of any previous call from me…

Veckans ord: höjdarbeten

Allehanda spionorganisationer har med varierande framgång använt sig av vackra kvinnor som höjdarbeten i hopp om att locka eller pressa hemligheter ur höjdarna. Ibland har det gått alldeles väldigt bra, som för Betty Pack, som lär ska ha skrämt franska ambassadens säkerhetsvakt på flykten genom att sexa på golvet med dennes överordnade och när kusten var klar lagt beslag på flottans chifferböcker.

For Bev

If he wasn't such an awful player, they would still be recording

Stop-motion photography recreates computer games using human pixels



Space Invaders
Pong
Pole Position

In the top 4%

They don't do them like that anymore

When I was a kid, ”Mamma är lik sin mamma”, sung by Siw Malmkvist, was a big hit in Sweden and the Finnish version, ”Äiti kuin äidinäiti”, sung by Katri Helena, in Finland. The song is a bitter complaint about how women cannot look forward to anything but drudgery in the home. Certainly my mother used to hum it quite often at the time.

Recently I had reason to quote from the song and decided to research its origins a bit. (Oh, Google, how seductive thou art!) To my surprise I found that the Swedish lyrics had been written by Stikkan Anderson, not necessarily the first name that comes to mind as a feminist advocate, but perhaps unfairly so. However, the music was not by Stikkan and a bit more searching revealed that it originally had been a hit in Australia, sung by a young heart throb by name of John Farnham and with the title “Sadie, the cleaning lady”, with approximately the same sentiments as in the Nordic versions, though restricted to a single woman, the eponymous Sadie. I note that even though the Finnish lyrics are a fairly straight-forward translation of Anderson's Swedish version, a reference to ”saamaton haisunäätä”—no-good stinker—hints that lyricist Lasse Liemola knew the English original lyrics.

Then of course, it is available at YouTube and my goodness! they don't do choreography like that any more…

Veckans ord: riskexponering

När jag nu flyttat så hittar jag inte riktigt i den nya matbutiken, så hur skulle jag få tag på de riskex som jag uppskattar så? Ponera att de sorteras som knäckebröd, då borde de finnas i den hyllan. Min riskexponering visade sig vara fullt korrekt och jag hittade mina kex.

Använd rakblad istället!

Veckans ord: paradontologi

Ett ämne som är sorgligt försummat på Försvarshögskolan är paradontologi. Finns parader, och i så fall varför? Vaktavlösningen vid kungliga slottet gör sitt bästa men når inte riktigt upp till de mest sublima höjderna av militär fjollighet.



Tack till Martin R för uppslaget.

Telepresent flying

A head-mounted display, a swivelling video camera and a radio-controlled aircraft—fly away with both feet firmly on the ground.

Video

It must be all the fish they eat

Mafalda once noted that you hardly ever hear about Norway in world news as dried fish isn't as newsworthy as wars. Now the Global Peace Index has shown that, indeed, Norway is the most peaceful country on Earth. (And Iraq is the least peaceful, surprise, surprise.)

Well, having strolled around in Oslo, even late at night, I can well believe that and certainly the Norwegians deserve the distinction, but I can't help but think a bit more about how the measurement has been made. It is scientific in the sense that the scoring is presented and the motivations for the choices of parameters given. The authors note that there is a certain level of arbitrariness in assigning scores.

I'd like to pick on a few of these arbitrarities.

Neither the Vatican, San Marino, Liechtenstein, Luxemburg, Monaco nor Andorra have been included, nor are Niau, Tuvalu, Cocos Islands or Surinam. Maybe they were considered to be too small to count, but if so, that does say something about reasons for peacefulness. (And Afghanistan, Belarus, and Eritrea have not been included either.)

Much of the ranking depends on the nations' scores on various 5-level scales. Having a discretised scale introduces various quantification errors. Ideally I should now have done a perturbation analysis to see if changing a score by a single unit would change the ordering between, say, Norway and New Zealand (the current number two on the peacefulness list), but I have not been able to find the exact weighting formula that has been used. (Possibly it is given somewhere on the site, but not sufficiently obviously to me.) The methodology section indicates that various numbers have been “banded” into these discretised scores. It's not obvious why one would want to do that, as retaining continuous data would give higher data quality, in that we would not be throwing information away. Furthermore, if any of these variables are assessments, rather than quantised continuous data, then we are abusing the numbers.

To wit: Using the numbers, say, 1–5 to grade something introduces an ordinal scale: we can say that “1” is better than “2”, but we cannot really tell if the difference between “1” and “2” is equal to the difference between “3” and “4”. That's why computing grade point averages really is bogus, it's not a well-defined operation. For that you would need at least an interval scale, where we are guaranteed the each step is the same size as any other step.

So the moral is: if Flight of the Conchords are more peaceful than KLM then you may not have been qualified for university.

Rude, sexist and sophomoric, what more could you ask for?

The British medical duo Amateur Transplants play and sing, mostly on key, the most hilarious lyrics to well-known tunes. If you don't want to shell out for their CD or DVD, many of their numbers are up on YouTube:
You're a pædophile
Lion King
Titanic
Drugs

(There's more…)

H/t Of Two Minds

Actually, I think we will end up in the future regardless of what I do

You scored as Scientific Atheist, These guys rule. They know the rules of debate, the Laws of Thermodynamics, and can explain evolution in fifty words or less. More concerned with how things ARE than how they should be, these are the people who will bring us into the future. Scientific Atheist 100% Spiritual Atheist 75% Apathetic Atheist 67% Militant Atheist 50% Agnostic 50% Angry Atheist 42% Theist 17% What kind of atheist are you? created with QuizFarm.com

Outside eyes

It is an interesting phenomenon that while Martin R and I both blog in English, we seem to be at heart Swedish patriots, convinced that only in Sweden are things as they ought to be—or at least that Swedes know how things ought to be, even if we have not gotten around to fixing everything just right yet.

So, it is good to be reminded every now and then, that others see Sweden, that is, the world, somewhat differently. Probably the readers of this blog already read Paddy K, so today I wanted to highlight How to learn Swedish in 1000 difficult lessons. (And what is it with these Americans that never get around to learning Swedish properly, hmm?)

Speculative fiction

The term “speculative fiction” was introduced some time in the 1960s by younger authors that considered “science fiction” to be too restrictive. Fair enough, the genre is certainly fuzzy enough around the edges. However, it never really caught on; possibly it sounded a bit too academically precise. A web magazine that still carries the banner of speculative fiction is Strange Horizons. Fiction, to be sure, but also columns, analyses, art and poetry and with sometimes rather oblique connections to speculative fiction per se, i e it is rather eclectic. So am I, so I certainly don't mind. Go read!

Veckans ord: kooperation

Här är en grupp veterinärer som utför en kooperation.

Traffic sign spotting

The good news are that no matter what your hobby, there will always be someone with an even pottier obsession. Today we'll have a look at the people who collect, categorise and analyse traffic signs. Did you know that the number of stones on “Beware of falling rocks” signs varies from 2 to 45 depending on the country of origin?

Hat tip to Haba.

Dioder!

Squeee! I'm a hoppity-happy IKEA customer! I found Dioder LED strips—four 250 mm segments with nine white LEDs in each, with the included connectors they can be connected in series or in parallel, straight or at various angles, screwed or glued to any flat surface. They seem to be a bit of an experiment, you have to ask a shop assistant to bring them out from their secret store. (And they are a bit expensive at 400 SEK. On the other hand I suspect they will never burn out.)

The Only-begotten Son and I played around with them in various configurations but finally ended up with a quite straight-forward linear strip in the ceiling lighting up the bookcases. Wooh, they are so cool!

Not to say biolo-chic

Good show

So I went to the hominid exhibition and on the whole I was quite pleased with it. I was a bit annoyed by all the early hominids being depicted with half-open mouths—it made them look like halfwits (and maybe that was the intention, but still) but they were all nicely done. (The Neandertal woman looked very sweet, reminding me of a friend of mine. :-) The people who had done these reconstructions are obviously very skilled (as a modeller I can attest that making life-like humans is non-trivial) and frankly, the locally produced reconstructions of other animals, such as the Diatryma, rather paled in comparison.

But, what really pleased me was that the texts surrounding the exhibits were very clear and managed to present a lot of information in a very compact space on what had driven the evolution of the different species of hominids and really present the branching bush with multiple, co-existing species. Furthermore, noise-producing exhibits were kept down to a minimum, which however didn't make so much of a difference as it seemed every toddler parent in Stockholm had brought along their kids for me to stumble over. (I've lost my reflexes as my own kids these days are taller than me.) Most kids seemed very happy and excited by all these strange-looking people that now were dead. (“Why did they die, Mommy?” “I don't know, maybe they got sick or something.” This is of course true for the individuals, if not for the species as such, one had better keep track of what is meant—these reconstructions being both based on individuals, but also being representatives of all their contemporaries.)

Veckans ord: ströget

Uppe i Klippiga Bergen är det ensligt, man ser bara en och annan ströget.